Read On;y External Disc

Hi all, I’ve been happily using an external 1tb hard drive for backing certain work up to once a month or so.
Today I tried and it wouldn’t let me copy anything to it - still loads of room left.
I did the ‘get info’ and checked the ‘sharing & permissions’ and they say ‘You can only read’ with no options for changing it.

Anyone got any ideas?

thanks in advance.

Trev


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When you attach an external drive, there is an option to Ignore Permissions on this disk. I forget where it is, but that’s what you need to set. It’s probably in Get Info on the disk itself at the Finder level. No idea how this could have happened, but that should sort it for you.

1TB is way below the limit where I would guess that the filesystem cannot address any further space, unless this drive was mistakenly formatted as an NTFS (Windows NT) volume. Try looking at it in Disk Utility and see what it says about the disk format.

Walter

On Oct 4, 2011, at 12:33 PM, Trevreav wrote:

Hi all, I’ve been happily using an external 1tb hard drive for backing certain work up to once a month or so.
Today I tried and it wouldn’t let me copy anything to it - still loads of room left.
I did the ‘get info’ and checked the ‘sharing & permissions’ and they say ‘You can only read’ with no options for changing it.

Anyone got any ideas?

thanks in advance.

Trev


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Thanks Walter,
I’ve gone into disk utility and told it to “Verify Disk”, all of the other options were greyed out. After verification the “Repair Disk” option became available which I tried and it then came up with the message:

Verify and Repair volume “2TB BACKUP”
Error: Could not unmount disk

but the permissions side of things are still greyed out. Do you reckon it’s looking like I’ll have to copy everything to somewhere else and reformat (It’s MS-DOS FAT 32 by the way, and 2TB not 1TB)?
once again, thanks in advance
Trev

On 4 Oct 2011, at 17:54, Walter Lee Davis wrote:

When you attach an external drive, there is an option to Ignore Permissions on this disk. I forget where it is, but that’s what you need to set. It’s probably in Get Info on the disk itself at the Finder level. No idea how this could have happened, but that should sort it for you.

1TB is way below the limit where I would guess that the filesystem cannot address any further space, unless this drive was mistakenly formatted as an NTFS (Windows NT) volume. Try looking at it in Disk Utility and see what it says about the disk format.

Walter


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Possibly a bit more success.
I’ve managed to tell it to Repair Disk, which it says it’s done, but the last line of the repair quotes:

Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

So not a clue what this means or how to do it!!

Trev

On 5 Oct 2011, at 08:23, Trevor Reaveley wrote:

Thanks Walter,
I’ve gone into disk utility and told it to “Verify Disk”, all of the other options were greyed out. After verification the “Repair Disk” option became available which I tried and it then came up with the message:

Verify and Repair volume “2TB BACKUP”
Error: Could not unmount disk

but the permissions side of things are still greyed out. Do you reckon it’s looking like I’ll have to copy everything to somewhere else and reformat (It’s MS-DOS FAT 32 by the way, and 2TB not 1TB)?
once again, thanks in advance
Trev


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Trever,

If the disk your talking about does not have an OS (operating system) you have no need, no permissions to verify or repair.

Walter was just looking for the formatting info:“Try looking at it in Disk Utility and see what it says about the disk format”.-Walter

That would look like this:

At 08:23 +0100 5/10/11, Trevor Reaveley wrote:

Thanks Walter,
I’ve gone into disk utility and told it to “Verify Disk”, all of the
other options were greyed out. After verification the “Repair Disk”
option became available which I tried and it then came up with the
message:

Verify and Repair volume ³2TB BACKUP²
Error: Could not unmount disk

Repairing a disc is really about repairing the filesystem on the
disc. This is a complex datastructure that defines how to access your
data as well as the data itself. It cannot correct this ‘sideways
view’ of the disc while the ‘top view’ is being presented as files
and folders to you as objects on the Mac. It has to ‘unmount’ the
disc first which takes away that ‘top view’. It cannot unmount it if
any file or folder is open through that ‘top view’ as doing so could
compromise the integrity of that open data.

OS X knows that any folders that are open purely in order to display
the contents in a Finder window can be discounted because those
windows can be closed as part of the preparation for unmounting
without problem. There must be some other thing running that has some
file or folder on that volume open and so preventing the unmount.
Just quitting applications may fix it or it might be something you
don’t normally think of as an application. Spotlight could well have
something open on it.

At 08:36 +0100 5/10/11, Trevor Reaveley wrote:

Possibly a bit more success.
I’ve managed to tell it to Repair Disk, which it says it’s done, but
the last line of the repair quotes:

Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

So not a clue what this means or how to do it!!

That’s what it was doing at that point. You don’t have to do
anything. It’s not confusing you with the details :-).

David


David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
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Frank, David, thanks for the replies.
I’ve managed to get even further now, apart from Disk Utility still saying “Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required” it seems to be working okay again, I can read, write, copy etc. so haven’t a clue why the permissions should have changed, although in Disk Utility I still can’t verify or repair permissions.

Does anyone now know how to update the support partitions? Or even if it’s needed!!

Trev


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On 5 Oct 2011, at 10:37, Trevreav wrote:

Does anyone now know how to update the support partitions? Or even if it’s needed!!

Um, no, but I think I’d back up everything on the disk and reformat it to OS X journalled as soon as possible.

Assuming of course you don’t need it to be in FAT 32 format for cross platform stuff.

That’s what I’d do, but your mileage may vary.

Cheers

Heather


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Thanks Heather, that’s just the way my head was starting to point - now then, just to find enough space to copy the contents to!!

Trev

On 5 Oct 2011, at 11:05, Heather Kavanagh wrote:

On 5 Oct 2011, at 10:37, Trevreav wrote:

Does anyone now know how to update the support partitions? Or even if it’s needed!!

Um, no, but I think I’d back up everything on the disk and reformat it to OS X journalled as soon as possible.

Assuming of course you don’t need it to be in FAT 32 format for cross platform stuff.

That’s what I’d do, but your mileage may vary.


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Hi Trev,
I’ve had too many hard drives bite the dust over the years to entrust anything I care about to a single drive. I’ve files duplicated online using JungleDisk (that uses the Amazon S3 network), some on DropBox (which again, I believe uses S3) and an increasing amount on a set of raid drives where the data is mirrored over the drives. As the price of storage falls I find it helps me sleep at night knowing that I’ve duplicate drives should the worst happen. Raids won’t stop me panicking if the office gets flooded but then that’s what the inflatable dinghy is for! :slight_smile:
Regards,
Tim.

On 5 Oct 2011, at 11:10, Trevor Reaveley wrote:

Thanks Heather, that’s just the way my head was starting to point - now then, just to find enough space to copy the contents to!!

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Ha, and guess what I’m going to be doing this upcoming weekend?
Buying hard drives and backing up,

thanks
Trev

On 5 Oct 2011, at 11:26, Tim Plumb wrote:

Hi Trev,
I’ve had too many hard drives bite the dust over the years to entrust anything I care about to a single drive. I’ve files duplicated online using JungleDisk (that uses the Amazon S3 network), some on DropBox (which again, I believe uses S3) and an increasing amount on a set of raid drives where the data is mirrored over the drives. As the price of storage falls I find it helps me sleep at night knowing that I’ve duplicate drives should the worst happen. Raids won’t stop me panicking if the office gets flooded but then that’s what the inflatable dinghy is for! :slight_smile:
Regards,
Tim.


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At 05:37 -0400 5/10/11, Trevreav wrote:

Frank, David, thanks for the replies.
I’ve managed to get even further now, apart from Disk Utility still
saying “Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required”
it seems to be working okay again, I can read, write, copy etc. so
haven’t a clue why the permissions should have changed, although in
Disk Utility I still can’t verify or repair permissions.

Does anyone now know how to update the support partitions? Or even
if it’s needed!!

You must have missed the bit where I said that the “Updating boot
support partitions” is just reporting that it is doing that itself.
You don’t have to do anything - it’s been done.

David


David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
email@hidden
www.ivdcs.co.uk


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